Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud expanded into five new regions including Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Melbourne, Australia; Osaka, Japan; Montreal; and Amsterdam.

This is the first Oracle cloud expansion push of the new year and brings Oracle's cloud region count to 21. But it's worth noting that while most cloud providers have multiple data centers within each cloud region — Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, calls these "availability zones" — Oracle counts each facility as a "region" and plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where it operates. 

The company originally announced plans at Oracle OpenWorld 2019 to launch 20 new Oracle Cloud regions by the end of 2020 for a total of 36. There is a reason for this very-specific number: 36 would place Oracle ahead of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that is present in 20 regions, and potentially within striking distance of  AWS with its 22 regions (but 69 availability zones) and Microsoft Azure, which is currently available in 54 regions.

Expansion has also been a high priority due to customer demands, according to the vendor. 

“Customers have told us that to run critical systems of record in the cloud, they need to run workloads across fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes,” wrote Oracle Director of Product Management Andrew Reichman in a blog post announcing the new cloud regions. “They also told us that those multiple sites must be in the same country to meet data residency requirements.”

This is the reasoning behind Oracle's plan to put at least two regions in almost every country where it operates. Oracle now has two regional sites in Japan, Australia, Canada, and The Netherlands — or, in the case of Amsterdam in the EU, a second jurisdiction paired with Oracle’s existing Frankfurt region. 

The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil are expected to have two regions live by the end of 2020, according to the blog post. 

Oracle started building its Generation 2 Cloud over three years ago. But despite efforts toward cloud expansion and fortifying its offerings, Oracle’s cloud business has been losing market share and disappointing investors. Revenues were basically flat year over year at around $9.6 billion for the second quarter of its fiscal 2020. Meanwhile cloud giants AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba have prospered.

Last October the company announced several new cloud services including automated cloud security and Autonomous Linux. Still, most of Oracle’s cloud customers are simply moving their on-premises Oracle workloads to Oracle’s Cloud, as opposed to net new customers. So will these new services and expanded footprint be enough to win the cloud wars — or at least take market share from the big three?

“Clearly, they’ve been beefing up their infrastructure play,” said Gartner analyst Sid Nag in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “But engineering doesn’t win the day. You can have great engineering infrastructure, but how are you going to attract customers? The key piece that will drive the market share catchup game would be getting more net new clients.”